Rapid estimation of overall mass-transfer coefficients in liquid chromatography

Abstract

The stochastic or microscopic model of chromatography has been applied to determine overall mass-transfer coefficients from peak shapes recorded in reversed-phase liquid chromatography. The stochastic model of chromatography describes the separation process at the molecular level by probabilistic terms. This microscopic model is rather straightforward and it can furnish direct answers when one tries to understand the development of chromatographic peaks. In this study we demonstrate that this model can be rather simply used to estimate the fundamental mass-transfer characteristics of the separation process. The only information needed to obtain the mass-transfer coefficients is the first and the second moments of the chromatographic peak.